Labour's shooting star falls to earth

Well that didn’t take long, did it. Yesterday the media were drooling over Rory Weal, the 16 year-old who became an instant mascot of the Labour party when he ripped into the ‘vicious, right-wing’ Tories’ at the party conference.

Today, the teenage shooting star fell abruptly to earth.

In his speech, he had given the impression that he and his family had been left destitute following the repossession of their house two and a half years ago.

16-year-old Rory Weal, from Maidstone, addresses the Labour Party Conference at the Echo Arena in Liverpool.

Indeed, attacking the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance he proffered the piteous spectacle of not being able to go to school in the mornings, buy educational materials or go on school trips.

He owed his ‘entire well-being’, he said, to the welfare state and would not be standing there at all had it not been for that safety net.

Yesterday, I wrote here that his speech was a mantra of hate directed at the ‘vicious, right-wing’ Tories which was chilling in the way it parroted left-wing propaganda.

Now further details have emerged that reinforce that judgment.

It has emerged that Rory Weal benefited from a deeply privileged upbringing before it all went pear-shaped.

His father was a millionaire property developer who, before his business went bust, owned two luxurious homes and sent his son to a costly independent school.

Sure, his father’s business did crash, the luxurious homes were repossessed, the parents divorced and times became harder.

But there is a great difference between downsizing from a mansion and a an independent school to a pleasant semi-detached and a grammar school on the one hand, and on the other living in such abject poverty that merely going to school becomes impossible.

It has emerged that Rory Weal benefited from a deeply privileged upbringing before it all went pear-shaped.

It seems extremely unlikely that Rory Weal is actually in the latter position.

Indeed, blogger Guido Fawkes has pointed out that since the 16 year-old appears to be Tweeting on an iPad, it is hard to see quite why he should need an Education Maintenance Allowance.

If he had merely said that the welfare state had helped his family during difficult times, that would have been absolutely fair enough. But he did not.

He said he owed his ‘entire well being’ to the welfare state and would not have been at conference had it not been for that safety net.

As I wrote yesterday, that was clearly absurd. For a start, it made no acknowledgement of the part his parents had played in his wellbeing.

I wrote that ‘if true’ those words meant that every single good thing he now had was down to the state.

But clearly that was not true. He owed a great deal to his privileged background -- and in particular to his £13,000 –plus per year independent school, which undoubtedly helped give him the confidence to stand up and make that speech.

He may be a confident orator, however, but clearly he has never learnt that what words mean actually matters.

If true, the words he used meant he was entirely a creature of the welfare state. But that was clearly not true.

What was revealed instead was how he thought about his place in a world where the welfare state was all beneficent and all encompassing, and where anyone who disagreed was to be vilified as ‘vicious ‘and ‘right wing’.

Moreover, as I also wrote yesterday his home was repossessed under a Labour government.

Blogger Guido Fawkes has pointed out that since the 16 year-old appears to be Tweeting on an iPad, it is hard to see quite why he should need an Education Maintenance Allowance.

It was Labour’s catastrophic stewardship of the economy that drove it off the edge of the cliff – and probably took Rory’s father’s business with it.

Yet Rory seemed incapable of grasping this connection. To him, it seemed, everything bad was the fault of the Tories -- who were reversing all the wonderful gains made under 13 years of Labour government.

The most egregious absurdity, of course, was to blame the Tories for damaging the educational life chances of pupils like himself.

Yet he attends a grammar school, possibly the greatest engine of social mobility ever invented.

Is Rory Weal grateful to his grammar school for the opportunities it is giving him? Apparently not.

He tells us that he disapproves of it and only attends it because his parents sent him there. In this he faithfully echoes the Labour party, of course, which wages unceasing war on selective education.

And yet the fact is that it is Tory-run Kent Country council, which maintains his grammar school in the teeth of Labour hostility, which has been Rory Weal’s educational safety net.

There are those who say look, he’s only a kid, cut him some slack. But people can’t have it both ways. If he was really ‘only a kid’ then no-one should have paid the slightest attention to what he said.

But at the Labour conference he was hailed as some kind of prophetic voice come amongst them to lead them back to the promised land, clasped to the Leader’s bosom and feted as a future prime minister – all on the strength of what he said.

We are therefore entitled to observe that what he said was deeply alarming in its vacuous sense of entitlement and its knee-jerk vilification of those with whom this young man disagreed.

The question now is, with a very uncomfortable spotlight being shone upon a 16 year-old boy, whether Rory Weal was just a silly lad who spontaneously chose to get up on that platform – or whether the Labour party had a hand in his performance. If so, it has a lot to answer for.